Archive for October, 2007

After installing the various gpg-agent packages (gpgsm, gpgagent etc.) and still no luck a simple “sudo apt-get install pinentry-qt” did the trick (installs the password-entry dialog). Note that you have to start the gpg-agent manually (eval `gpg-agent –daemon`) before starting KMail.

I’ve followed the discussion and introduction of the GPL v3 for a bit. One major change in the license is supposed to close the loophole commonly referred to as the “tivoization” of GPL software, i.e. mechanisms that prevent people from tinkering with the product they bought which includes GPL software. Tivo, in particular, accomplishes this by requiring a valid cryptographic signature for the code to run – the user has access to the code, but it’s of no use. One of the main ideas of the GPL was to allow people the freedom to tinker, improve and understand how something works. This got me thinking a bit about software that uses machine learning techniques.

For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that somebody releases a GPL version of a speech recognition system, or say an improved version of a GPL speech recognition system. While the algorithms would be in the open for everyone to see, two major components of speech recognition systems, the Acoustic Model and Language Model, do not have to be. The Acoustic Model is created by taking a very large number of audio recordings of speech and their transcriptions (Speech Corpus) and ‘compiling’ them into statistical representations of the sounds that make up each word. The Language Model is a very large file containing the probabilities of certain sequences of words in order to narrow down the search for what was said.

A big part of how well the speech recognition system works relies on the training. The author who improved upon the software should publish the training set as well. Otherwise people won’t be able to tinker with the system or understand why the software works well.

The same would hold for things like a handwriting recognition system. One could publish it along with a model (a bunch of numbers) that make the recognition work. It would be pretty hard for somebody to reverse engineer what the training examples were and how training was conducted to make the system work. Getting the training data is the expensive part in building speech-recognition and handwriting-recognition systems.

Think Spam-Assassin – what if the authors suddenly decide to not make their training corpus available anymore? How would users be able to determine the weights for the different tests?

I don’t think this case is covered by the GPL (v3 or older) – (However, I’m not a lawyer). Somebody could include the model in C code (i.e. define those weights for a Neural Net as a bunch of consts) and then argue that all is included to compile the program from scratch as per the requirements of the license. However, the source by itself wouldn’t allow anybody to understand or change (in a meaningful way) what the program is doing. With the growing importance of machine learning methods just being able to recompile something won’t be enough. I think this should be taken into consideration by the open source community for GPL v3.01.